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Two years ago last month we evacuated from a town about a hundred miles from where I now sit ten minutes before it was bombed. Ever since then, with the exception of six months that we were parked in a friend’s house in Dallas, TX, we have been living out of suitcases. Literally. We’ve stayed in more guest bedrooms and guesthouses than I can count scattered across five different countries. We’ve celebrated birthdays, anniversaries and a few major holidays on the go and had a baby along the way in there somewhere too. During a few visits with relatives and one sweet holiday week in Jinja, Uganda last month Bryan and I shared a room alone, but other than that at least one baby, usually two, has been in our room, sometimes our bed. All our belongings reside in trunks, the sturdy plastic kind you get at Wal-mart, and have a stateside address written in permanent marker fading under the sticky remnants of duct tape. They are a royal pain to get in and out of every time you need a notebook or pair of socks.

As traumatic as the events surrounding our hurried departure from North Africa were two years ago, that experience has been in many ways far easier than the wearing toil of two years of constant travel and homelessness.

We have been in one place (more or less) for the last six months. We have settled in a refugee camp just across the border from where we used to live; it is home now to about 45,000 people, including almost all of our old friends and neighbors. And despite certain realities here that everyone is coming to terms with, it is a good place to be.

On May 23^rd we broke ground on a house and launched into a huge building project. It is difficult to overstate the difficulty of building a simple house here (we are talking cement blocks and tin roof – but granted it has three little bedrooms and an office). The logistics of getting building supplies to a place that does not sell so much as a two-inch nails in the market and whose unpaved rainy season roads have been unpassable for a while still makes my brain hurt. And the volume of cement used to make my new walls so smooth when a single bag costs as much as $45 honestly makes me feel like throwing up a little bit. This has been a difficult, expensive project.

During these last few months that we have watched foundations being dug and walls slowly go up we have lived in a tukul on our compound, a 4X8 meter mud hut with a grass roof. You have heard me talk about the tukul before. It was charming at first, cozy and unpretentious. But tukuls aren’t designed to be lived in exactly. They are to be slept in. So when I tried cramming all my wal-mart trunks full of crap into it and then tried to make space to cook in it, put my kids down for naps in it, sit at the computer and write a blog in it, so on and so forth, not just because that is what we do in houses where I come from but also because twenty men with wheelbarrows and hacksaws were covering every inch of space outside … I gallantly led my whole family on a slow but very steady descent into insanity.

In the end it was really the rats that did me in. I am a messy person by nature, and the carefully landscaped piles of laundry, books and kitchenware in every bit of livable space was really just a mild irritant on most days (don’t ask Bryan about it). The ants coming up through the floor were not a big deal and two babies a few feet away from us every night was a little bit endearing really. But the rats. Oh my goodness, the rats.

I could write volumes about the rats. About how they learn to nudge the trap to set it off without risking their lives and then eat the bait and anything else they want. About how they sound when the light goes out and what starts as one or two scurries above and behind you becomes a full-blown horror-movie style closing in from every direction. About how the sweet relief of silence is really the shivering of rodent terror broken only by whiskery screams as the snake chases granddaddy rat from behind one of the trunks and just past baby’s pack n’ play. About how when they finally breached the mosquito net fortress I just gave up on sleep all together and waited the 36 hours until the front door was nailed on the new house so I could move in. There were days I eyed the matchbox behind my stove and thought about how much I would love to shoo my family out the front door and then delicately light the whispy edge of my roof and sit perched in a nearby tree with a BB gun and shoot every living thing that came out right between the eyes.

It was not a pretty season.

I tell you all of this not to make you feel sorry for me or reflect on how tough I am or sit astounded by the sheer absurdity of putting oneself in this situation intentionally. I tell you this – all of this – the evacuation, the travel, the tukul and the construction site all because I want you to understand just a taste of how incredibly happy I am right now. To feel just a flicker of the absolute joy and relief I am experiencing.

I am in my new house.

For the past three nights I have slept in a bed with my husband in a room with no children anywhere in site. I have bathed under a roof and between cement walls without frogs hopping on my toes. I have cooked dinner in a kitchen with cement counters and enough room to make about as big a mess as I want to. I have plopped my babies down on a wide empty floor and not worried about them being eaten alive by stinging ants. And when I wake up to animal noises at night it is only the cry of the white owls in the huge baobab tree outside my wide windows. And I just say, Dear God, please let them be eating rats, and then roll over and fall back asleep. 

For the first time since Bryan and I were married we are living in a place we can imagine being in for ten years or more. For the first time in their lives my daughters have their own room. And for the first time in two years, I feel like I can unpack my trunks.

Bryan reminded me tonight not to be devastated when the honeymoon ends and I realize I don’t have any furniture (yet), the house is only partially wired for electricity so far and we are still taking bucket baths and eating lentils. And he’s right. Whatever the reasons, bad days will come again.

But, praise the Lord, they will come in my house. They will come in my house where I have a room to cry in or a kitchen to knead frustrated bread in or a floor to just sit on and love my babies. And after those bad days have barged in my front door, swept through the living room and then slipped out the back door and disappeared off the porch, I will still be here. Here in a place where I can think about what dreams I will dream in these walls, what words I will write, what conversations I will have with my husband. About what things will make me laugh and what things will make me cry. When I leave this house someday in the future, what things about me will be the same and what things will have changed.

A house is not everything. The Important Things have been with me all along, in the airplanes and guesthouses and tukul. And I am more thankful for them than I have ever been before.

A house is not everything. But tonight it feels like so much.